


irrational and sublime

by mickleborger



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 22:56:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2246442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mickleborger/pseuds/mickleborger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Saren is having a Bad Day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	irrational and sublime

You have felt small in the face of the world before.  You have felt small and weak and afraid, and you have known yourself to be nothing before the vastness of your galaxy.  You have known grief and emptiness and you have made do with those; they are meaningless below the twinkling stars.  You have known pain and loss and you have moved on from those; they are petty concerns in light of the place you hew here for yourself in the dark.  If the universe is large and pitiless then you, also, must be without pity.  If the world gives you nothing then you must claim it for yourself.  Chaos will not abate on its own; it is you who must bring it to heel.  Everything that can go wrong must be fixed; every ill that can be done must be righted.  Order is not spontaneous but it can be brought; clarity must be sought, but it is there.  This is what you have been taught.  This is what you have learned.

This is what you repeat to yourself incessantly, rigid in your chair in a ship where the bulkheads don't tilt quite right.  You repeat this to yourself and you wring your hands, insisting to no-one that you're imagining that faint chuckle in the background.  There is no conundrum that cannot be solved.  There is no loss that cannot be recouped.  There are no impossible situations, and if you seem feeble now you will come out of this stronger.

You repeat this to yourself as you think of your home which glints red and grey in the sky that stretches out before you.  You repeat this to yourself as you remember faces that can now _only_ be remembered.  You repeat this to yourself and never do you once meet the eyes of a parent who would not know her own child if she saw her.  You will mitigate damages and you will keep the peace as ever you have done; and in the end you will be home again, and it will be exactly as you remember it.

You repeat these things to yourself (as if no-one hears you) because if you do not there is only silence left buzzing in the air that sits heavy on your fringe and smells too much of ozone.  If you are silent there will come not-whispers about you, settling in your teeth and talons and deep inside your chest like the rush of wind about a man in free-fall.  If you look anywhere else but at your boots you must look at the walls; if you feel anything but the dig of your claws into your palm you must feel the thousands of staring eyes that are not there.  Sparks dance around your head and you hear them all and when you grow tired of mantras you can count them, over and over again, until the moaning sounds like it could almost be an engine (an engine!  the silence makes sense and, horrified, you return to counting).

You remember blood on the ground and it isn’t yours but it could be - and you don’t know, you don’t know, but the thought of it makes your teeth grind.  You remember fire.  You remember all the times the galaxy has made you feel small and helpless and you think of how large the world seemed and suddenly there is a ringing in your ears and you remember with a sudden chill where you are.

You are still small in the face of the world but you never imagined that the world itself could ever seem small in the face of something.

You decide to call the noise from the walls a howl.


End file.
